Much of the discomfort experienced in critical attempts to find a respectable approach to Hollywood results from the hesitation in acknowledging that although the industries of culture are of central importance to the daily life of all western and most other societies, they are not important because of any inherent profundity they may possess. On the contrary, their lack of profundity is, on the whole, a condition of their status as entertainment. Only Angels Have Wings is “about” the response to death, heroic stoicism, imperialism, racism, and contempt for femininity, but it is not profoundly about those things. It is shallowly, sentimentally, and inarticulately about them. It is about the surfaces of these themes and commonplace attitudes and assumptions about them, and it is about them on its own surface. But this does not diminish Hollywood’s importance. For if we are to study a culture, then its sentiments, its commonplace attitudes, its silences, and its hesitations are a vital part of that study. A criticism that takes Hollywood seriously can look less to the discovery of profound meanings or concealed purposes in its texts, and more to the equally difficult task of articulating the silences and equivocations, the plenitudes, excesses, and banalities of their surfaces.

from Maltby and Craven, Hollywood Cinema 456-7